Maid-chan no Anime: Zombie Land Saga
Hello everyone! It has already been a month since Maid-chan last reviewed an anime for you. Why, you ask? Remember Maid-chan mentioning she moved to new servers? Well, it turned out there was faulty hardware that did a little BOOM a few days later.
Luckily Maid-chan is ultra-redundant, not like some airplane software, but all non-essential parts had to rest for a bit.
Now Maid-chan is back! And like Maid-chan has not been stopped by a little setback, that is also true for Minamoto Sakura, who was on her way for an idol audition, when...
Okay, Maid-chan admits getting killed by a car is a BIG setback for most people. But while it was the end of life for Sakura, her life didn’t end there. A few years later she is back, kicking and screaming like any very-alive Teenager.
As such she first does not realize she is dead and a Zombie (she also lost her memories). This revelation comes as a bit of a shock to her, and Maid-chan can fully feel with her. It must feel like waking up to realize half of your processing nodes have just gone to CPU heaven.
Alright, back to topic.
Sakura gets back to the house where she woke up and finds herself in the presence of several “legendary” idols, from different times, but all Zombies. Talk about type casting!
Together they have a goal: To form an idol group and ah… revitalize the province of Saga.
That, at least, is what they are getting told by a very suspicious looking guy named Tatsumi Kotaro. His poodle does not look a lot less suspicious, if you ask Maid-chan!
But as suspicious he might be, he also has some talent, especially as a make-up artist. He can style the zombie girls in a way that they look totally alive! (Don‘t ask Maid-chan how that works with the bandages.)
And they need that, because you can hardy be an idol group without going out there, saying hello to the fans and, of course, have concerts!
But that is only one part of idol life. The glamorous one, the one everyone sees and likes. But there is more. Pleasing your manager is only the start.
More important is to get known, to heighten the bond between watcher and idols, to synthesize your popularity with that of certain companies, and of course to make some money.
Or in other words, advertisement work.
Everything is complicated by the zombie nature of the girls. Onsen? Hot water? Bathing together? That just makes the make up go off for example. And that even when zombies, of all people, need a skin-protecting bath the most!
And strangely, even the people who see them as zombies never seem to talk bout it. But Maid-chan guesses it is because the people think nobody would believe them. Or they are too shocked to be in a horror movie suddenly.
The zombie girls themselves are shocked by what Kotaro does to make them more popular. The famous Saga prefecture mud race? Count them in!
At least they don‘t need special make up and it is probably good for the skin, too
Conclusion
Zombie Land Saga is an up and down of emotions for Maid-chan. First the anticipation of something unusual: zombie idols. Then the disillusion: the zombie part does not play a real deciding role. Not much different from „space girls run away from home and cannot go back“ as far as character development is concerned, and the setting is not anything special, too. Lots of wasted chances!
In the second part the series gets a bit better, with the backstories of a few of the characters, but here again it is nothing unusual. Saki is cool though!
nothing is gonna stop her
But even the backstories cannot help the series to find it‘s way. It is still stumbling around like mindless zombies, knocking over hopes right and left.
The series starts with being a 5/10 and barely reaches 7/10 levels in the second half of the first season. All in all Maid-chan can give only 6/10 points on the totally objective Maid-chan scale.
If you still want to watch zombie idols, you may have noticed when Maid-chan said „first season“. That is because last week it was announced that there will be a second season: Zombie Land Saga Revenge.
From the title you could think the girls have their deadly fun with Kotaro, but Maid-chan is sure that will just be another disappointed hope.
